Dingle was great that night, and Scarne was a wreck. He lost control of a card in the deck because he accidentally turned the cards around so the crimped corner was visible to us at home, but not to him on the other side of the table! He also couldn't seem to get the card into the wallet and his hand was inside his jacket for what seemed like an eternity. It was sad to see.

I agree about Scarne, he lost control of the card and had to go through the pack face up and he just cut to the card! He should have been better during the 40s, even though he was cheated by some cheats during his campaing to protect the troops. He was very good at advertising himself.

I just watched the Scarne clip: it's funny how your memory works. At the time, having seen Dingle do Card to Wallet where his hand went into his pocket and then came immediately out with the wallet (no hesitation--I really should publish his technique one day), it seemed to my young eyes that Scarne took two or three minutes to get the card into the wallet, and get the wallet out of his pocket. Looking at it now, he's still in there fiddling around much too long, but it's not as long as I remembered.

A friend told me he once waited outside of a Philadelphia TV studio to meet John Scarne. Scarne did the card to wallet for him and my friend still remembers the "beat up old wallet wrapped up with rubber bands".

There is some video of Scarne doing the Card To Wallet very well. I believe it was on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show -- it could have been Pierre Berton hosting. David Ben or Patrick Watson may be able to help. I think by the time Scarne was on Tom Snyder, he was well past his prime (and I recall that he was on the show not because he was a magician but because he was discussing his games).

I thought the Scarne performance was fine. It's not unusual for the basic parts of taking a wallet from that pocket to cause more fumbling than transferring the card, and from their own experience people don't expect that to happen seamlessly. Also, he had done nothing to tip it off as a suspicious gesture; the palm was pretty perfect. And the wallet's rubber band-incarcerated state sells the whole thing, as does flipping the wallet to the spectator. A YouTube "tutorial" should be one-tenth as good.

That said, anyone not intrigued by Richard's post above isn't getting full value from their time here. Just the fact that he can offhandedly recall possessing a piece of history like that is one of those hard-to-explain reasons that I actually like magic. Personally, I don't care a great deal about "entertaining" audiences or any of the other counterfeit reasons that I've passed off. But is there any other field where you can participate in a de facto conversation like this one, with people of similar stature?

I think the action of removing a wallet from your jacket pocket is something that people do automatically without thinking. So when it hangs up, it draws suspicion. That's what, to me, makes Scarne's hand wriggling around trying to get the card into the wallet, and then get the wallet out, so agonizing.

The Overhand Shuffle Palm that Scarne did was perfect--interesting camera angle there because for most performers they would've been exposed at that moment.

Thanks for the link to the Scarne clip, because it led me to the "Harry Riser talks about Scarne being put in his place" clip, which led me to "Harry Riser tells a funny story about Al Goshman", which lead me to "Harry Riser talks about his good friend Charlie Miller", etc., etc.
I love to listen to older magicians recounting these kind of stories. It's much more entertaining than watching them perform their rendition of card to wallet.

I think the name of Wesley James should be mentioned when referring to Derek's handling and/or technique for the card to envelope/wallet.If you refer to the Wesley James book "ENCHANTMENTS" there's a section in the book that talks about he and Derek working out the mechanics of the card to envelope/wallet one afternoon at a restaurant in New York City.